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A simple way to access Shadow Copies in Vista

In the past, I presented various ways to browse these mysterious device objects called "shadow copies". Shadow copies are static images in time (snapshots) of your volume contents, at some point in the past. These shadow copies are volumes on Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 28, 2008 10:37 AM by AdiOltean | 29 Comments

[RO] Seminar - Storage si programare distribuita

Florin Lazar , Todi Pruteanu si cu mine am demarat in cursul acestei saptamani un seminar tehnic pe teme de storage in Vista si programare distribuita in WCF. Mai multe detalii aici: http://reg.studentclub.ro . Pana acum seminariile din Bucuresti si Cluj Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 03, 2007 10:57 AM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Gartner redesigns Windows Vista

There is an article in Techworld.com mentioning a curious research report from Gartner implying a redesign of the Windows Vista code base, around virtualization. Huh? To quote from the article: Instead, the research firm predicts, Microsoft will be forced Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 26, 2006 1:55 PM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments

WS-Management? Already here in Vista!

WS-Management is a new web services-based management protocol. It's SOAP-based of course, and it is compatible with the rest of the specifications in the WS-* Web Service stack, like WS-Transfer, WS-Enumeration, WS-Addressing. WS-Management is enabled Read More...
Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 10:19 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

Ahh, backups... the eternal conversation subject

Finally! The wait is over. Brett Shirley started to blog. As I expected, Brett started with a highly technical, but very interesting story . You might not believe it, but many customers are very optimistic, and they never perform backups of their critical Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 05, 2006 4:49 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

Getting the free space available under a certain directory

There is a useful function called GetDiskFreeSpaceEx( ) . The GetDiskFreeSpaceEx function retrieves information about the amount of space that is available on a disk volume, which is the total amount of space, the total amount of free space, and the total Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 31, 2006 8:25 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

More VSHADOW stuff: how to backup Exchange, SQL, NTFS

While researching for the previous post, I just started a few searches for VSHADOW on the internet, and I found more interesting usages of it. One example: EqualLogic published a nice technical report of using VSHADOW to backup/restore Exchange, SQL and Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 25, 2006 12:47 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

Fast backup of Virtual Server images (using VSHADOW)

Jeff Trumbull published a very nice script on how to backup a Virtual Server image wiht about one minute of downtime! The solution uses VSHADOW.EXE, a small command-line utility that can be used to create shadow copies. VSHADOW is part of the VSS SDK Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 25, 2006 12:39 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

The VDS API is now public on MSDN

The VDS API is now live on MSDN ! What is it? VDS offers a COM-based API for volume, disk and LUN management in Windows Server 2003. In Windows Server 2003 R2, we also have additional integration with iSCSI targets and MPIO. For example, you can use it Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 05, 2006 4:04 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

How to do atomic writes in a file

Let's assume that you want is to write some simple code that writes to a text file. A few assumptions: 1) You need avoid corruptions of any kind. 2) Either all of your writes have to make it to the disk, or none of them. 3) The file is updated serially Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 28, 2005 2:51 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Singularity - a new research OS from Microsoft

Here it is: http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/ There are several interesting ideas in this new operating system. It's not just an "OS written in managed code". There are a new set of techniques in modern software development: contracts, verifiability Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 06, 2005 9:40 AM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

DOSDEV.EXE - a misterious tool

Once in a while, you might encounter this tool in some Microsoft-provided SDKs, or Resource Kits, for example in the Windows Resource Kit, the Exchange Report Toolkit, and others. But this tool never came with any relevant documentation. It just displays Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 04, 2005 6:51 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

Random Repro vs. Consistent Repro, and a surprise under the cover...

(Continuing on my previous post on supportability) Supportability Principle # 3 - When writing code, avoid random, hard-to-diagnose, unpredictable failures at all costs. I previously mentioned that good predictability means less costs in supporting your Read More...
Posted Monday, October 03, 2005 2:42 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Supportability is not a feature

I recently read about a Linux to Windows switch story . It made me remember something: supportability is crucial to the success of your software. Your programs are out there in the wild, alone. There are no helpful debuggers that you (or anyone) can hook Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 01, 2005 5:09 AM by AdiOltean | 5 Comments

Are there any COM programmers out there?

Even with all this new wave of .NET stuff, I still find myself in the XXI century doing good old COM programming - and I enjoy doing it... So is anyone still interested in blog posts around COM programming? (especially around COM servers, COM security, Read More...
Posted Friday, September 30, 2005 11:56 AM by AdiOltean | 10 Comments
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